Review: The Silkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens pays Tribute to Forgotten Workers on ‘American Railroad’

By Greg Cahill | From the January/February 2025 issue of Strings

The first transcontinental railroad—initially, 1,911 miles of rough-hewn wood, rock, and cold steel built between 1863 and 1869—stretched from Council Bluffs, Iowa, to Oakland, California. In the 19th century, it laid the foundation for America’s burgeoning industrial growth and immense wealth. It was constructed with the blood, sweat, and tears of African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and other long-forgotten laborers. 

American Railroad pays tribute to their memory by melding diverse cultural influences on a concept album that ranges from traditional American folk to world music to chamber and symphonic forms. The opening track is a powerful stripped-down medley of the trad tunes “Swannanoa Tunnel/Steel-Driving Man,” the latter being a nod to the mythic African American steel-driver John Henry. The Swannanoa Tunnel was a deadly stretch of railway built in 1879 in Asheville, North Carolina, by African American prison laborers. This track features Rhiannon Giddens on vocals and fiddle before flowering into a showcase for world music replete with taiko drums and tabla—the fiddle/tabla duel with Giddens and Sandeep Das is truly breathtaking. 

Two-time Grammy and Pulitzer Prize–winning singer and songwriter Giddens is artistic director of the Silkroad Ensemble, founded in 1998 by cellist Yo-Yo Ma. She contributes vocals, fiddle, and banjo throughout the 13-track recording that explores this complex chapter of American history. The album especially pays homage to Black rail workers. Other highlights on American Railroad include Wu Man’s bluesy, plaintive pipa ballad “Rainy Day”; violinist Mazz Swift’s hauntingly elegiac “Swannanoa Strings”; “Far Down Far,” written by Celtic harpist and composer Maeve Gilchrist and featuring Wu Man, guitarist Niwel Tsumbu, percussionist Haruka Fujii, and violinists Swift and Michi Wiancko; and the vocal harmony-rich closer, “O Shout!” Throughout, American Railroad brings new meaning to the term “world class.”